Thursday, November 18, 2010
Plan A, Plan B
Second-guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking of the President are well underway. Most of it is dubious and only time will tell whether the President was right or wrong. This opinion, however, is interesting. It concludes that the President had a plan for turning around the economy but when deterioration outstripped the plan, the president lacked a Plan B or Plan C. The insight may or may not be correct, but it does point to a common problem with plans. They fail in the face of reality. That is, one should make robust plans that can be adapted quickly when events turn out to be different than one thinks. Locking into one plan is dangerous. From a PR perspective, one may change tactics frequently, but not the message. The message for the economy was job creation. The President needed multiple ways to tackle creation of employment, but he may not have had them ready to go -- a basic management failure. On the other hand, there may have been little that he could do in the face of the worst economic downturn since the Depression.
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